Zurprise! Zune not manufactured by Microsoft

A new FCC filing reveals that the Zune won't be manufactured by Microsoft at …

When the Zune was first confirmed by Microsoft, critics had questions. What did Microsoft know about manufacturing a portable music player? How would the company avoid alienating its own hardware partners, many of whom make their own PlaysForSure devices? Now that the answers are trickling out, the whole scheme makes more sense.

According to an FCC filing made public yesterday, the Zune won't be made by Microsoft at all, but by Toshiba. Toshiba's filing for model no. 1089 shows that the company already has working prototypes of the device, which will come in white, black, and brown. The filings are complete with photos that show the Zune being tested for electromagnetic interference, so if you've ever wanted to see the inside of Toshiba's Anechoic Chamber No. 1, this is your chance.

The filing confirms most of Zune's key features. It will come with a 30GB hard drive, a three-inch LCD, and an FM tuner. It will play music, store pictures, and show video, and it can be hooked up to a TV set for a better picture. This is all pretty standard stuff, but one of Zune's distinctive features will be its support for WiFi. Users can send "promotional copies" of songs, albums, and playlists to other nearby users. It sounds simple enough to use, but the filing does not define "promotional copies" (earlier referred to as "controlled sharing" by music execs)—we expect these to be time-limited in some way.

The other WiFi feature is "DJ mode," in which Zuners can stream music to four other nearby devices. The streaming can be limited to friends or left open to the world, in which case anyone with a player can listen in to your current tunes (this will generate an on-screen notification that you have a listener).

Having Toshiba produce the players looks like a good move. Toshiba has extensive experience manufacturing consumer electronics and music devices, in particular, and the move will also placate one of Microsoft's big hardware partners. It remains to be seen whether other manufacturers will somehow get a piece of the action; if not, expect some irritation on the part of PlaysForSure licensees like Samsung, who will now be competing with their own technology supplier.